the prison conditions were outdated. In January 2016 Vridsløselille reopened as a detention site for rejected asylum seekers, whose only crime is that they will not voluntarily travel back to the country from where they have fled. The place was built as a prison in 1859 and is designed as a classical, Panopticon-inspired prison with the possibility of central surveillance of the detainees in individual cells. The Panopticon was originally designed by the British lawyer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791 as a model for prisons, hospitals and other institutions of discipline. In its ideal form the Panopticon is designed with a tower in the middle surrounded by a building divided into isolated cells. From the tower, the observer can observe while the detainees in the individual cells do not know when they are observed. It is a spatial design that makes constant surveillance possible. In this sense, the architecture (the spatial design) makes control possible. The closure of the state prison and the reopening of it as a detention site for migrants can be seen as an example of how architecture creates the material frameworks for control over people. The walls of a prison can be demolished and new ones can be constructed. A former hospital can be rebuilt and altered so that the opportunities for a new life are made possible. The connection between architecture, violence and racism as identified by Lambert makes visible how the location of the camps, as well as the architectural design of the buildings and what histories they carry along, cannot be separated from questions of violence and structural racism. It is the architecture that creates the physical frameworks of the stay of the detainees in Vridsløselille prison and in the rest of the asylum system’s open and closed institutions.
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– Léopold Lambert is an architect, writer, editor and podcaster. He is the editor of The Funambulist magazine (http://thefunambulist.net), which features numerous interesting conversations and articles on issues such as borders, Fortress Europe, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, geopolitics, law, philosophy, and much more.
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